On Bodies

By Kristiane Weeks-Rogers

 

Pre-Visit Questionnaire

Is your tongue swollen?
Can you rid this people, this land, of canker-hexes?
Are you an ultraviolet or magenta warrior?
Are you thermonuclear fission?
Do your arms feel heavy?
Are your linguistics based in nature?

Where is funding lacking in your community?

Does envisioning your obituary bring you closer to utopia?

Is your reason lacking gratitude?

Do you have study area boundaries?
Are you in a confinement which feels like freedom?

How many poems are odes to your worth?

How many of your laws outlive their time period?

Do you have a peace and justice center?
Is scientific development a victim of your administration?

Where is the urgency in your blood?

How many freckles list achievable goals?

Are you asking the tough-love questions of your body?

En Cuerpos (ubicación)

A little house with chipped

sage siding not in kitchen but

wherever city-pulse hides:

not digital, or only digital through energy —

there is a disconnect

within body, violet

and magenta flowers hang against blue sky.

 

A vibrating flower finger

Oh, fly on this sill doesn’t move,

rubs hind legs together like

palms in anticipation.

I offer my sight, benevolence, vessel to hang

your kimono.

A city kept in a room, walk circles into carpet.

 

Bite.

It was not the dream which became conjecture,

to crave skin under skin.

I am here to

 

Palms caked with dirty loam,

claw deeper in.

I never learned your middle name,

this

a different definition of

intimacy:

 

dog barks on balcony

starlings take hay from nearby ranch

right beneath horse jaws —

back and forth to make nests like hives,

chirps and shadows like

children holding sticks against fences

as they walk.

 

These bodies are shifting

but aren’t going anywhere,

so it’s best to reach out now —

an Instagrammer says “Hello”

and rain barely falls like background

white noise, “Soy quien soy.”

Skin-Memory

 

It’s all about consent even with the dead;

 

it’s all about the body–

you do not have permission

to enter

 

*

 

because of horror films and Little Debbie Swiss cakes and sunworshopping and not knowing how to befriend my curls and being a girl who kept her door locked while her brothers played together at ___________.

 

A line, a cushion, a shadowed color

 

*

 

I want a body language

words

which shift sensation, if only

for a flicker;

I want language to move

like a song can move you,
spin around inside and on body.

I want sentences to pop like a heartbeat

beating beyond body or time’s

expectations

 

*

 

do you know where your healing crystals come from?;

boundary for self-healing, boundary for/against violence
boundary as eco-poets!

Boundary to fill in every gap humans have heeled into land,

 

A line for answers, truth, your Truth, combined Truth,

we are all adding to the line,
to what it means to live in truth,

so why not just write it out through skin?

Post-Visit Questionnaire

If given the choice, would you choose

a crown, a specter, or fire?

 

Fire destroys, heat creates –

ash allows opportunity for growth.

When people handle fire, brutality begins.

Brutalizing each other, we fight fire with teeth.

 

When we search for cause,

when we attempt clarity,

is this where the crown

and scepter come in?

An eye on the scepter shows

an eye over all,

an eye keeping out for each other.

 

Am I doing enough? Being? Is this reflection helping?

what I see

from my place in the hill –

am I wearing a crown? Is there a temple?

 

I am no longer sure this body is truth,

but I am ready,

my body is ready for art and war.

 

 

Kristiane Weeks-Rogers, SHE/HER/HERS, is a poet, professor, an aesthete. She grew up around Lake Michigan and earned higher education degrees in Florida and Indiana. She recently earned her MFA at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado where she teaches as a Writing Seminar instructor for BA students.